Allow your search engine representatives to manage your accounts

The representatives of the specific PPC search engines have full access to their platform and are the people who understand well the platform.

However, not all representatives from all 2nd or 3rd tier search engines can spend sufficient time to manage your accounts. Also, the representatives may not know enough about your industry and may struggle to optimize your campaigns for your expected ROI.

Outsource your accounts to search engine marketing agencies

Depending on the experience levels of the agencies who are to manage your accounts, some agencies possess PPC expertise can effectively lower your cost and improve the ROI of your campaigns. It will incur high campaign management cost for you, depending on the PPC business models.

For those web sites that are in niches and extremely competitive industries, you may have to spend large amount of time in educating your agencies. It will require regular communication with the search marketing agencies so that they are fully aware of changes on your web site. The changes could be new product or service launches, strategies, marketing budgets, or the entire industry.

Outsource your accounts to “work-from-home” PPC specialists

Outsourcing to work-from-home PPC specialists often cost you less than outsourcing directly to experienced search marketing agencies.

Whether the specialists possess deep knowledge about your industry, you are still required to educate them about your products or services. However, managing individually “work-from-home” specialists may usually be more difficult than managing most search marketing agencies.

Hire “part-time” students or interns to manage your accounts

This is probably the least expensive option. 2nd and 3rd tier search engines are much less complicated than top tier search engines like Google Adwords or Yahoo Panama in terms of optimization. However, most Interns come quickly and go quickly. The best is to develop effective “quick start” courses so that they will be able to start managing your campaigns right away.

Final words

With 2nd and 3rd tier search engines, you should determine how they should be best managed, how the best ROI can be achieved, and how all the challenges of PPC in 2008 can be overcome. Some companies may want to avoid 2nd and 3rd tier PPC search engines.

Set Expectations

Never expect the lower-tier PPC search engines to perform better or even similar to the top search engines. The best is to initially set lower expectations. The top tier PPC platforms are just too powerful regarding click volume and demographics, user experience (with platform functionalities), bid-gap reduction (or discounter), and click fraud protection.

Set Priorities

Test the 2nd-tier search engines before the 3rd-tiers. It is certain that there is no way you are going to try out a search engine which is totally unknown before a better known second-tier PPC search engine (such as Miva.com).

If your products (or services) are in a specific industry (or niche), you may want to first consider spending on PPC search engines that are in your industry. For example, advertisers who have websites that are of B2B nature may want to first test Business.com or Gowholesale.com.

Also, if your strength is on search targeting but not on content targeting, you should first test on other search engines that have search targeting platforms, rather than jumping into contextual advertising (e.g. Adbrite).

Get the Data

If the PPC search engine ranks your ads by using a metric such as Clickthrough rate (CTR = Click / Impression), then it makes sense for the search engine to provide the data so that you can analyze the performance on all levels (campaign, adgroup, keyword and even ad).

Some PPC search engines (such as Ask.com Sponsored Listings, with its new platform) do apply CTR when ranking ads, but unfortunately do not provide Impression in any of the reports. This causes performing basic analysis and advanced optimization very difficult. Advertisers may well be wasting their marketing budgets.

Test the Best Keywords and Ads (Only and No More)

First test the 2nd- and 3rd- PPC search engines with the best keywords and best ads from your top-tier PPC search engines (e.g. Adwords). If your best ads and keywords cannot do well on a search engine, the chance for other keywords and ads that go down the best performing list to perform well is slim.

You may be wasting your valuable time by dumping your entire Adwords keyword list into a smaller search engine, unless there is a simple mass migration solution across different PPC platforms.

Detect Click Fraud

Use a click fraud detection system if possible. Either sign up for one or use your own (if you have developed one). Simply Google ‘Click Fraud Detection’ and you should find loads of related results or even a system that will suit your need.

Make Tough Decisions

You can only test before you find out. However, if nothing works well for you, you will have to decide whether you should spend your marketing budgets and time somewhere else.

Vallez insisted that Ask’s contextual advertising product is unique from its competitors.

• It gives publishers more control over yield and relevancy
• It gives publishers more creative ad unit opportunities
• It allows both advertisers and publishers more control over where and what ads are displayed

You won’t find the standard white background with text ads. Our hybrid text + graphical contextual units will offer a fresh new look to performance based contextual advertising.

Webmasters who are currently running contextual ads via other networks (like Adsense, YPN, or Adbrite) on their websites and are not getting satisfied results, may want to try this new product.

With search, Ask also upgraded its paid search marketing platform in October 2006.

In the ad, it claims that Looksmart has over 400 million daily searches. Other impressive traffic related statistics include in categories:

• Health: 25,464,734 daily searches at $0.13 average cost-per-click
• Travel: 16,562,084 daily searches at $0.18 average cost-per-click
• Finance: 23,394,174 daily searches at $0.20 average cost-per-click
• Electronics: 14,410,882 daily searches at $0.14 average cost-per-click
• Home: 9,609,619 daily searches at $0.13 average cost-per-click
• Auto: 11,242,229 daily searches at $0.13 average cost-per-click
• Entertainment: 10,006,069 daily searches at $0.10 average cost-per-click

This above statistics actually tell you that Looksmart’s partner network is more specialized in health-related traffic. The volume on finance came second, though the CPC is the highest among the above categories. Whether the traffic volume equals to the click quality, advertisers will have to run some tests on it.

Interestingly in the ad, Looksmart also branded itself as a non-big-brand ppc search engine. However by signing up to Looksmart via this ad, as paid search advertiser you will get a coupon of $50 value in clicks.

Looksmart is inviting all online advertisers to stand in unison. It’s time someone told the ‘Big Guys’ we’re not going to take it anymore.

Also from time to time, I have always been approached by the so-called 2nd- and 3rd- tier PPC search engines. The sales representatives often came up with the selling pitch similar to below:

• Our search engine will increase your traffic by 200%
• Our conversion rate is 20% higher than Google Adwords
• Our cost-per-click across the board is 25% lower than Adwords

Since a couple of years ago, believe it or not, I have tried at least over 80 non-1st-tier PPC search engines. In my experience, most of them shared the problems below:

Reason #1: Distribution

After Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing, the distribution level of other PPC search engines fall off sharply. A good example is MSN Adcenter. Being recognized as the third paid search marketing platform, the distribution level of Adcenter is only a small fraction of Adwords or even Yahoo! Panama.

From this conclusion, the 2nd-tier search engines who have been maintaining high traffic quality are definitely not providing high traffic volume and great reach regarding search network distributions.

Reason #2: User Experience

It is the great reach of distribution that has helped the top-tier PPC search engines to collect more data about their users. With the data, they are then able to continuously improve the user experience by enhancing the reporting and all types of features in their paid search marketing platform. To mention a few enhancements by the top-tier search engines,

• Adwords updated its Quality Score to reduce low quality ads, and has already made its Quality Score more visible to advertisers.
• Yahoo! Panama introduced a way for advertisers to flag their important campaigns, groups and keywords and to have them all displayed in display panel.
• MSN Adcenter was first to introduce demographics options allowing advertisers to only show ads to certain age groups and specific genders.

Obviously, this is not something I have seen with lower-tier PPC search engines.

Reason #3: Cost

Adwords was the first PPC search engine to introduce Quality Score in ranking ads, and in the Quality Score a great portion of it is the CTR. This is one of the main reasons experienced PPC advertisers have been able to save hundreds of thousands of marketing budgets on Adwords.

Only after a couple of years other top-tier search engines have followed. Adcenter, Panama and Baidu all are using a similar way to the Quality Score to rank ads. Ask.com and Adbrite are also using CTR as a factor in ranking ads.

The other search engines down the ranks have not been able to catch up with this technology and are mainly ranking ads based solely on pricing. Basically, they have offered no solution to save cost for their advertisers. This can only make them less attractive to major advertisers and less competitive to the major search engines.

Reason #4: Traffic Quality and Click Fraud Concerns

To increase traffic volume, some of the less known search engines would sign up large amount of distribution partners, without concerning too much about their traffic quality. It is a way for the 2nd- and 3rd-tier PPC search engines to survive, but at the same time they are putting their reputations at risk.

Click fraud detection is also another big concern for the lower-tier search engines, as they are often reluctant to offer technologies to detect possible click fraud. Much of the click fraud detection has to be performed by the advertisers, in which this collides with one of my previous posts on 5 ways to spot click fraud. Click fraud has become great of a concern than ever, and not long ago Inside Adwords Blog has revealed the 3 steps of click fraud detection,

• Real-time filters
• Offline analysis
• Reactive investigations

Reason #5: Return On Effort

Vinny Lingham previously explained in details about Return-On-Effort (ROE) with one of his posts.

Basically, the argument on ROE is that advertisers should spend their time and efforts on expanding and tuning their existing paid search campaigns. In doing this, the ROE will be higher than spending time and effort on the non-1st-tier PPC search engines.

Experts believed Conde Nast choosing Miva over Google or Yahoo! is because Miva will be able to provide higher flexibility of customisation and relevancy of ads.

With Miva, publishers can decide whether a web page should use the contextual engine of Miva to dynamically serve ads based on the page content, or they can manually pick keywords to match text ads to content or demographics of site visitors.

In January 2007, Miva launched its contextual ad network, offering publishers the options of content-targeted ads, in-text hyperlink ads, and Miva-powered search box. Chrysi Philalithes, vice president of marketing and global communication of Miva, even mentioned Miva Monetization Center was created to provide more customisation and transparency than the larger competitors, and to give publishers a larger share of the revenue.

Clickriver Ads provides the opportunity to advertise services and products that complement the selection on Amazon.com, via sponsored links that display on search result pages and product detail pages.

Clickriver Ads was built by A9.com, a search technologies company based in Palo Alto, California. A9.com is a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.com.

The Clickriver Ads beta provides the only direct way to create, track and optimize sponsored link ad campaigns on Amazon.com. However, Clickriver Ads are not the only sponsored links on Amazon.com. We also display sponsored links from 3rd party ad networks.

I believe it can be one way of the other that either ClickRiver’s ads will distract the potential buyers on Amazon.com, or the buyers will not click on ClickRiver’s ads.

Adbrite’s blog explains:

AdBrite’s CPC auction used to work such that an ad with the highest bid won. Now, the system takes into account each bid, as well as each ad’s clickthrough ratio. In other words, an ad that has a low bid – but many clicks – could be shown instead of an ad with a high bid but few clicks.

Showing ads with a higher clickthrough ratio means that we’re showing more relevant ads – and everyone likes ads that are more relevant. A side-benefit is that CPC prices may drop while targeted click volume increases.

If you’re an advertiser with campaigns running right now with AdBrite, this upgrade may (or may not) affect your campaigns. If your CPC and/or click volumes change, this is why.

This is certainly the new age for online placement ad industry as previously MSN Adcenter, Ask.com Sponsored listings, and China’s Baidu PPC have all implemented multiple factors in determining their ad rankings besides CPC. Yahoo! Search Marketing is expected to follow this trend by Q4 of 2006.

eBay AdContext differs from eBay’s current manual ad placement system as currently partners create their own selection of eBay ads on their web pages, by manually entering specific words and categories as keywords for listings to return. However, eBay AdContext will automatically read the content of the web pages and serves ads that are most relevant to the content.

Initially eBay AdContext will only serve eBay ads, however, many predict that eBay will further monetize by opening up the new ad contextual system to all adveristers and all websites, much like what Google does with Adsense.

However, eBay sees the new ad contextual system as complementary to, rather than competing with, Google Adsense. The principal motivation behind eBay AdContext is to serve higher converting ads to eBay affiliate network.

While Google Adsense determines contextual relevancy based on the text on a web page, eBay AdContext serves ads that are relevant to what users are actually shopping for. Also, colorful variety of ad layouts, formats and styles are available through AdContext.

Another difference between Google Adsense and the new eBay AdContext is that eBay will be disclosing its revenue share payout schedule with its publisher network partners. It is reported that eBay AdContext publishers will receive between 40% and 70% of sales depending on volumes.